Glenn A Baker,

The wonders of Sri Lanka’s Cultural Triangle will dazzle even jaded senses, discovers.

The Sri Lankans knew they had something beyond palm-fringed beaches and misty tea plantations to command the attention of travellers; something concentrated in a burst of tightly packed splendour sufficient to dazzle even jaded senses.

They knew it in 1982 when a plan was drafted to tell the world all about it. But then came the inconvenience of a civil war waged by the Tamil Tigers which effectively severed the country from a lucrative tourist trail, dismantling its national carrier in the process.

The recovery was stymied again by the Boxing Day tsunami but now, a clear run of sunshine has enabled the teardrop shaped isle to finally focus international attention on its Cultural Triangle, with a flow that has increased by a quarter in some years. All the planks are in place – an array of major airlines servicing the capital Colombo, all levels of efficient infrastructure and plentiful quality hotels ranging from boutique heritage bungalows to plush resorts.

One can certainly become enveloped in sites of Buddhist history in India, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Tibet and China, but few of these enclaves can claim the intensity, the sheer convergence of the modern and the archaic, all tumbled one upon another like a huge theme park.

Stupas, sculptures, extraordinary architecture, monastic ruins, reservoirs and the thronged Full Moon festivals of Wesak and Poson, jungle-encased for more than a millennium, all evoking ‘‘the intense experience of ancient Buddhism’’ and its introduction to Sri Lanka.

The centrepiece of the triangle – which describes a loose construct formed by the Sinhalese civilisations of Kandy, Poloonaruwa and Anuradhapura – is the giant Sigiriya Rock fortress near the town of Dambulla in the Central Province, which is best viewed, for the sake of perspective, from the Aliya Resort and Spa, a hotel artfully put in place by Chandra Wickramasinge, one of the fathers of Sri Lankan tourism.

Looming as a massive 200-metre-high column over the flat plains, the rock commands all attention, with even the distance rendered insignificant by the otherworldly spectacle it provides.

It sits lordly and alone and one thinks inevitably of Australia’s Uluru. The one significant difference is that climbing to the top is not discouraged, indeed it is facilitated and encouraged.

Steps and ladders, taking you past chambers of frescoes and murals of celestial nymphs, massive rocks teetering on pivots that could be removed when enemies approached, a mirror